More than a decade ago, the research community embarked on a journey to realize the old vision of Industry 4.0. Part of this vision was to digitize design and manufacturing systems and processes, aimed at advancing their vertical and horizontal integration into decentralized ecosystems across the entire product development value chain.

Sales figures often fail to accurately reflect the true demand observed by retailers. While sales data provides insights into consumer purchasing patterns, it does not capture the full picture of consumer behaviour. These missed opportunities significantly impact retailers' understanding of the actual demand for their products.

Real competition is between supply chains, not companies. Continued uncertainty and turbulence on both the demand-side and the supply-side of business, means firms must invest in effective supply chain management. As organisations have outsourced many of the activities they used to perform in-house, so too has their dependence upon other entities increased.

For both SpaceX and Tesla, Elon Musk has often discussed that the key for ultimate success is “building the machine that builds the machine,” meaning it is actually the factory that becomes the product, and the output from that factory is a desired feature.

“As we approach the (35th) anniversary of Lean, we see that Lean is both everywhere and nowhere. It is seemingly everywhere in terms of its tools and methods, but virtually nowhere in terms of its use as a comprehensive system of management in large corporations.”

It’s becoming mission critical for large organisations to have a holistic Industry 4.0 strategy, one that leverages Industry 4.0 principles and properly addresses the specific opportunities and challenges they face.

As workers get ready to start their morning shift, they are confronted with a supply shortage which has hit their Siemens’ Mobility factory hard: a critical microelectronics-part was supposed to arrive, but now the supplier has failed to deliver on time.

If people say your manufacturing firm is operating in an ecosystem, what does that mean? Actually, it means quite a lot. It has far-reaching consequences for how you need to think about strategy.

“Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.”